Imagine you’re an investor ( maybe you are ). How many investments would you have? You would try and bet on a few horses right?

Now imagine you bet on 10 horses. You put your limited partner’s money on a few bets, and now it’s go time. Your reputation is at stake.

So.. how are those horses doing?

You start calling them up one-by-one. You might have to fly around to get better updates – board meetings, sit-ins, VOIP calls that are impossible to schedule – all the shebang. And that 10 times.

Shouldn’t this be easier?

Now if you’re not an investor – I kid you not – one of the biggest wishes they have is quite simple. They just want to be updated once a month, without doing anything – and that in a quick and concise form. And that 10 times.

Doesn’t sound too hard, does it?

Unfortunately there is no simple way to do it. Some CEOs do it themselves – they train themselves into this habit. Some send an enthusiastic first email update out to everyone, and having invested so much time, dread the next update 30 days later. It suddenly becomes 60/90 days later without an update – and now it’s on the everlong ‘to do’ list.

That’s what investor relations departments are for.

That’s why – by law – listed companies have investor relations departments. To fully focus on just keeping the investors happy.

But we’re a startup, we’re not listed

Exactly, and you’re missing out on keeping your investors actually happy. Instead, investors are in the dark – they don’t like that. Having to call you up ( remember, you’re one of the 10 horses ), it takes a lot of time and work for them. And it also takes a lot of your time to update everybody one-by-one – It should be simpler.

We don’t need that – we have other things to focus on

Let me ask you this : When is your next fundraising round? And which approach would you like to take when that happens? Will suddenly ‘’shit hit the fan’‘ and ‘’we’re out of money’‘-panic mode set in? – Calling up existing stakeholders and potential investors anew? People who haven’t heard from you in half-a-year / 9+ months?

Now imagine..

Now imagine you updated them all along. Existing investors as well as potential ones. Those who politely refused but wanted to stay in the loop.

Just imagine.

So how should we do this?

You could train yourself to do this. You should actually, really. Because then you’d see how much time this actually takes. ( And we’re happy to say that CEOs who did it themselves, switched to us later on )

You could ask your CFO to do this. But from our experience CFOs are also heavily involved in flying around and preparing all kinds of balance sheets – it’s one more thing that’s distracting.

You could hire a dirt-cheap intern and invest a lot of time to train him.. to update your high-valued investors
Or you could let us take care of it, since that’s what we specialize in. No training and minimal hassle

SharkDigest works supersimple :

a) We arrange a time per month where we call you up – don’t worry, we abide by your schedule

b) We chit-chat on the phone or Skype about the company’s progress in the past month, and how everything else is going ( takes less and less time each month )

c) You, or your departments – supply us with your latest monthly KPI ( Key Performance indicators ) – but only the 6-7 most important ones. Let’s keep it simple

d) We write everything discussed up in a concise and robust draft email for you to approve

e) After your approval – we send it out to your desired stakeholder list ( this list could and should consist of your investors, your employees, potential investors, your business partners and of course your own management team )

Done, that was simple, wasn’t it?

As we always say – It’s simple, not easy. But for us it’s a habit.

One last thing…

To top things off, we also supply you with an investor page which we keep updated for you. Now, how awesome is that?